Tag Archive: installation

On my last Slackware Linux installation attempt I faced a tricky situation. Everything went fine (with some exceptions at start) up until the time I had to install LILO. The symptom was that the installation simply hanged but otherwise the system was responding. The problem was in fact with LILO and my 3TB drive which was in /dev/sdb and was not the drive I was using for my root partition. This drive had a NTFS partition. If this is your case then do the following. Let Slackware finish the installation up until the part you need to install LILO. At this point exit the installation process (do not reboot!) and run

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mount/dev/sda1/mnt

mount-obind/dev/mnt/dev

mount-obind/proc/mnt/proc

mount-obind/sys/mnt/sys

chroot/mnt

I assume you are using /dev/sda1 as the partition you are installing Linux on, if not, then replace it with the appropriate one. Your root is now the same as if you had booted your new operating system. Now it is time to reconfigure LILO. For that open /etc/lilo.conf with your favorite console editor (vim, nano, etc). Add the following line to your lilo.conf file

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# /etc/lilo.conf

disk=/dev/sdb inaccessible

You can add each one of these lines for each drive you don’t want LILO to scan. For example, all drives which do not contain an operating system installed on them are good candidates to be flagged inaccessible. Now install lilo by running:

I was trying to install Linux Slackware 14.1 on my PC, which has a P7P55 motherboard and Marvell PCIe SATA 6Gb/s controller. I had my SATA disks connected to the Marvell controller but the boot disk was not detecting them. The problem was that the module is not loaded by default due to some regression issues. In order to solve this you need to make sure the BIOS has the Marvell controller set to use AHCI. For that:

Reboot your PC and press DELETE in order to enter the BIOS management tool

Go to the Advanced tab and enter the Onboard Devices Configuration section.

Go down to the Marvell SATA Controller, press Enter and select AHCI mode.

Press F10 to save and quit.

Make sure you have your Installation CD/DVD or USB flash drive plugged in when the computer reboots.

When you boot your Installation disk do not press enter to boot the default kernel image. You now need to enable the ahci.marvell_enable kernel boot option. For Slackware simply type the following when the installation disk boot prompt pops up:

huge.s ahci.marvell_enable=1

That’s it! When linux finishes booting you now should see your disks under /dev/sdXyy. Continue installing your Linux system as usual.